Steve Persall, Times Movie Critic

Steve Persall's movie reviews usually appear in Thursday's Weekend section but — like his columns, features and interviews — can pop up anywhere in the Tampa Bay Times, any day of the week. Persall was conceived behind a Tarpon Springs drive-in theater his father managed, making him practically born for this job. He lives in Clearwater with his wife, Dianne (a.k.a. the right side of his brain), and trusty dog, Mojo.

Tampa's foremost film festival has booked the wild personality that anything named Gasparilla deserves: pitch-black comedian and filmmaker Bobcat Goldthwait.

Now in its ninth year, the Gasparilla International Film Festival runs Mar. 24-29.

Goldthwait will present his documentary Call Me Lucky, a profile of political satirist and activist Barry Crimmins, a longtime friend. Crimmins, a survivor of child abuse, uses his stand-up act to advocate social change....

Inside a modest one-story waterfront house, Burton directed a birthday party scene for his latest movie Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, based on a young adult novel by Ransom Riggs.

Burton's set was closed to the media but tell-tale signs of movie production were obvious. In neighboring driveways, tons of filmmaking equipment awaited use. More than two dozen crew members milled on lawns, or peered inside a garage at video monitors displaying the action inside....

Wanda Sykes doesn't give a damn what Kanye West thinks after bum-rushing Beck at the Grammys. • "He's crazy. He's just an egomaniac. He's nuts," Sykes said by telephone from Los Angeles, just getting warmed up about what occurred the night before. • "I wanted someone to ask him, when he's going off about real artists and Beck and whatever: Have you listened to Beck's album? It's pretty good. And having (West) think singing over a manhole cover is pretty spectacular? I say no, thank you, sir."...

For Will Smith, there is life after After Earth, his most embarrassing failure in an otherwise charmed career.

Smith's swagger is back in Focus, a caper not as clever as co-creators Glenn Ficarra and John Requa would like us to believe. Focus is a movie about con artists that itself is a complete con. It swivels logic and loyalties when necessary, borrows from better cinema scams like The Sting, and plays everyone for suckers....

Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks spent six days filming locally in 2013, mostly exterior shots to disguise the fact that the "St. Pete Beach" where it's set is really Budapest, Hungary, where principal filming occurred.

Viewers won't easily spot the difference, says Richard Alfieri, the stage play and now screenplay's author.

"It's all very true to the area," Alfieri said from Los Angeles, where he splits time with a family home in Redington Shores....

One of these Oscars, someone will arrive on the red carpet in a gown to top them all.

After 87 years, there must be enough awareness ribbons, slogan buttons and lapel pins for an enterprising designer to stitch together into a fashion statement of everything good and true.

That is what the Academy Awards spectacle is about: promoting yourself. In the old days of studio control, it was solely a star's next movie or new beau. Then it got weirdly political for a while — Brando's bogus Native American accepting his Oscar, Vanessa Redgrave's "Zionist hoodlums" remark and a telegram from the Viet Cong....

Anyone feeling giddy after last year's Academy Awards predictions should take a sobering look at this year's choices.

Last year was a breeze, a two-horse race with 12 Years a Slave and Gravity perfectly complementing each other in the grand scheme of Oscar balloting — historical art versus fantasy spectacle. I correctly picked 20 of 24 categories, a personal record over a lifetime of picking....

Yet attracting the production here is a neat trick itself, making a friendly rivalry between Pinellas and Hillsborough counties disappear.

Both counties' film commissions are joining forces, putting money where their individual interests lay. Each agency will pay $100,000 incentives to the production, after certain requirements are met....

Win an Academy Award for acting and immediately you're expected to do it again, or at least be in the discussion from time to time. Streep has three statuettes on her shelf, and a record 19 nominations overall.

An Oscar is a promise of continuing greatness that doesn't always pan out. For every Streep, Jack Nicholson or Daniel Day-Lewis justifying their bestowed posterity with long, acclaimed movie careers, there's a Roberto Benigni or Cher who never really pans out. Or a Mo'Nique who doesn't seem to care....

 This year's acting nominations set one record and extended another. Robert Duvall (The Judge) passed Hal Holbrook to become the oldest nominee ever at age 84, and Meryl Streep (Into the Woods) earned her 19th nomination.

 All four acting categories would be swept by first-time Oscar winners for the first time since 2010 if the favorites prevail. Eddie Redmayne (or Michael Keaton), Julianne Moore, J.K. Simmons and Patricia Arquette have never won before....

Give John Cusack credit for putting his art before money and skipping Hot Tub Time Machine 2 (R). Of course, if Cusack was that concerned about his art he wouldn't have starred in the first one.

Actually, his replacement is funnier (if only by default). Adam Scott, star of Parks and Recreation and vodka commercials, steps in as the most sensible member of four dudes gone wild. After the original took them back to 1986 in the titular mode of time travel, this one takes them back to the future. Part 2, that is, when Biff used the DeLorean to rig a fortune for himself....

Before Sunday's Academy Awards, take time to see Marion Cotillard's worthily nominated performance in Two Days, One Night, a sliver of working class life from the Dardenne brothers, Belgium's gift to filmmaking.

A common theme for Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne is ordinary people in everyday financial straits. It's no different for Cotillard's clinically depressed Sandra, a factory worker who can barely drag herself from bed to learn she's laid off from her job. Worse is why it happens: A foreman pitting co-workers against her, saying their work can be accomplished with one less employee, which would allow them to receive a bonus everyone needs....

Watching Kingsman: The Secret Service made me think of Casino Royale. Both of them. The silly first one with David Niven playing 007, and Daniel Craig's rebooted, bare-knuckle Bond. One spy romp nothing like the other, nor a particularly good match.

Matthew Vaughn's moshing of spy genre extremes is based on a comic book, a medium from which many of the director/co-writer's creative juices flow. Kingsman is as violently kinetic as anything Vaughn has made, a list including Kick-Ass (the good one) and Craig's U.S. breakthrough, Layer Cake....

It is finally here, the swooningly anticipated movie version of Fifty Shades of Grey, the book that millions read but far fewer were caught doing it.

And you know what? Director Sam Taylor-Johnson's movie isn't nearly as terrible as E.L. James' novel would make you expect. There's perverted, like the sado-masochistic sex games played by tycoon Christian Grey, and then there's perverse, like the pleasure of watching trash so glossily compacted....